The Solutrean hypothesis claims similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America, and suggests that people with Solutrean tool technology crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge, using survival skills similar to that of modern Eskimo people. The migrants arrived in northeastern North America and served as the donor culture for what eventually developed into Clovis tool-making technology. Sites such as Cactus Hill, Virginia, have yielded artifacts which appear to bridge the temporal and technological gap between Solutrean and Clovis cultures.

Jim Adovasio found stone blades and cores near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which he dated to 16,000BP[1]. Archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley concluded that the Clovis point did not derive from any stoneworking tradition from Asia known from the archaeological record. Instead, they traced a line of stone artefact development starting with the points of the Solutrean culture of southern France (19,000BP) to the Cactus Hill points of Virginia (16,000BP) to the Clovis point[2]. This would mean that people would have had to move from the Bay of Biscay across the edge of the Atlantic ice sheet to North America. This journey appears to be feasible using traditional Eskimo techniques still in use today, technology which would have been available to the Solutrean people.[3]

In addition, certain mtDNA anomalies in pre-Columbian Amerind populations leave open the possibility of alternate migration patterns into the Americas. Geneticist Douglas Wallace of Emory University, studying the mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, found an mtDNA type called X. Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer reports that X occurs 'only among Europeans and Native Americans